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Hurd Philip Charles has released the K16 snapshot of the Debian GNU/Hurd system. The K16 CD series includes a mini-ISO, 4 full CD images, and 2 DVD images. For the first time, a QEMU image based on the mini-ISO is provided as well.

Some students from MES college of Engineering , Kerala, India Developed a new installer for Debian GNU/Hurd It is named as Debian GNU/Hurd LX installer as the successor of K series t that boot Directly into X. Today it will be released

«Hurd having been in development for so long, but still not production-ready; and with Linux as a mature free kernel being firmly established as the de-facto standard kernel for the GNU system -- people often wonder: why haven't developers abandoned the Hurd long ago?

"A Dutch university has landed a European Research Council grant to continue work on a Unix-type operating system that aims to be more reliable and secure than GNU/Linux or Microsoft Windows..." -- see also The GNU Hurd project

"GNU Hurd (usually referred to as the Hurd) is a free software computer operating system kernel, released under the GNU General Public License. It has been under development since 1990 by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation. It consists of a set of servers (or daemons, in Unix terminology) that work on top of a microkernel; together they form the kernel of GNU. The Hurd aims to surpass Unix kernels in functionality, security, and stability, while remaining largely compatible with them..."

So what is the state of the Hurd? Is it vaporware, like Duke Nukem Forever? Fortunately not: the code exists, there is still work going on (for instance as part of Google Summer of Code), and there are even some relatively functional Hurd distributions. Let's look first at the code and the current architecture, and then at the Hurd distributions.

"...We make use of an installation script to install the GNU/Hurd system, which resides in the intial ramdisk having the base linux file system. The file system contains all the necessary binaries for the execution of the script...."